Dude! Thanks man. Modular is actually super easy to get your head around...basically take the culture of boutique guitar pedals (earthquaker, zvex, mr Black etc) and apply it to each individual component of a synth chain. So...in a Moog you have (generally) three oscillators feeding a mixer, feeding a vca triggered by an envelope, feeding a filter, feeding an output mixer. Modular let’s you pick each manufacturers weird take on each component in that chain...using the guitar analogy you might love zvex’s blown-out take on the oscillator and earthquaker’s super super clean filter. Now multiply by well over 100 small, super weird and interesting crews putting out their spin on everything imaginable you could put in a synth chain and you have today’s eurorack scene.
All of which would be great and specific and all...but the real genius is the fact that -all- of it runs on +- 5 volts for -all- sends and modulations. Very quickly the possibilities start exploding since it’s al right there in front of you...nothing is stopping you from feeding the bassline melody sequence (which is going to be expressed in a 5v scale) into the frequency cutoff on the filter (which is also looking for 5v). Or bouncing it to the delay time. Or the grain density knob on clouds. Once you build a few somewhat traditional voices to write your song with, it is insanely easy to start duping modulations all over your patch...and the generative stuff that comes out of it quickly overtakes whatever you were invisioning to begin with.
Left brain. Right brain. I’m the guy with the (modular) gun.
Ahhh cool ya that makes sense. So in a certain way of looking at it, is all digital synthesis basically modular since its so easy to run any sound through any other effect module in basically any order I want?
Like, Logic Pro itself is almost a giant Modular Synth by that definition maybe.
Yes and no. What makes modular “modular” is definitely the product of mixing different takes on the same building blocks of synthesis. Stuff like this exists in digital...but its somewhat more cumbersome to rout your mini Moog plugin oscillator directly into your prophet 5 plugin’s vca or filter than it is where each piece of the puzzle has its own ins and outs and you mix and match.